Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions provide tools and capabilities needed to create and maintain a clear picture of customers, from first contact through purchase and post-sales. For complex organizations, a CRM system may provide features and capabilities to help improve the way sales, marketing, and/or customer service organizations target new customers, manage marketing campaigns, and drive sales activities. CRM systems may include many components, hardware and software, utilized individually or in a shared manner by users internal or external to an organization.
Parallel to advances in CRM solutions, advances in technology have enabled proliferation of cellular phone networks over the last decade as an alternative to Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) systems, where users with cellular phones have access to one or more networks at almost any location. Also a recent development is the wide spread use of Voice over IP (VOIP) telephony, which uses internet protocol (IP) over wired and wireless networks. With the availability of such diverse types of communication networks and devices capable of taking advantage of various features of these networks, enhanced communication systems bring different communication networks together providing until now unavailable functionality such as combining various modes of communication (e.g. instant messaging, voice/video communications, data/application sharing, white-boarding, and other forms of communication may be combined with presence and availability information of subscribers).
This technology is also referred to as Unified Communications (UC). UC systems provide communication infrastructure to variety of enterprise organizational demands. Expansion in enterprise environments have enabled integration of UC systems with other traditional enterprise resources such as content providers and user account systems. However, integration with CRM systems is presently in its infancy. Legacy CRM solutions seldom interact with external systems to expand utilization of vast information maintained by CRM systems.